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Future Tech: Electric Yachts

Hinckley Yachts Look To The Future With Their Elegant And Innovative Electric-Powered Boat

As anyone who gets out on the water in the United States knows, Hinckley Yachts have built innovative yachts since the company was founded in Maine in 1928. But, the sexy "all-electric" 28-foot, 6-inch Dasher is unlike anything the company has ever built before.

For Harvard (No. 1 in the Slate 90 Education sector), it’s only the start of an effort to commercialize the churn of new ideas that has always characterized coursework, research, and lunchtime chatter at elite universities. The Innovation Lab will soon be joined by an Enterprise Research Campus, “a community for business, investment capital, research and science development” in Allston, where Harvard has amassed 250 acres of land. Originally set to expand the university’s footprint by 10 million square feet—about half the size of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina’s prime office space—the proposed Allston campus was downsized in the wake of the financial crisis. But it is still an ambitious bit of city planning, one that represents the new strategy that urban research universities are now pursuing—expanding into the commercial real estate for revenue, status, and influence. Out of the ivory tower; into the cap stack.

Harvard’s Allston plan may be the largest university-led urban development project in the country. But you would be hard-pressed to find a peer institution that has notthrown itself into commercial property development. While the word campus comes from the Latin for “field,” the old-style gated quad, set apart from the town or up on a hill, is decidedly out of fashion. Universities remain nonprofits to be sure, exempt from all manner of taxes. But as the Slate 90list shows, they are very large businesses. And because of this, their economic role in the American city is rapidly evolving. Yale (No. 2 in the Education sector) has spent the past two decades buying strips of storefronts around its New Haven campus, recruiting a Barnes and Noble and an Apple Store to what had once been low-rent rows of local businesses. Yale is now New Haven’s largest commercial landlord.